It is unlikely, however, that Julian’s bodily sickness was the bubonic plague.

As Rosemary Horrox notes in her collection of primary texts on the Black Death, in her introduction to the section collecting contemporary explanations for the spreading of the plague, “It was widely believed… that the plague could be transmitted by imagination: that a person could be infected by thinking about it… Physicians agreed that people brooding on the plague were more likely to be susceptible to its attack” ( 1994, p. When Julian was thirty years old, she prayed for a bodily sickness “so herde as to deth that I might in that sekeness underfongyn alle my rites of Holy Church, myselfe weneing that I should dye, and that all creatures might suppose the same that seeyn me, for I would have no manner comfort of eardtly life.” Footnote 1 This desire may have been more than near-suicidal ideation, it may have been a genuine attempt at self-harm. It was in this city during this plague that Julian had her seventh birthday.

Norwich went from “the second city of the realm” to a proverbial leper colony the city “not only never recovered its position in relation to the rest of England but, in absolute terms, had barely regained its vanished citizens by the end of the sixteenth century” (Ziegler, 1969, p. Of Norwich’s 13,000 inhabitants in 1349, 7104 people, or 56% of the population, perished in the pandemic. Before the plague, it was the second largest city in England, behind only London in total population today Norwich is not even among the top five largest cities in the country. Norwich was the English city most devastated by the Black Death. The specific circumstances of Julian of Norwich’s visions have never been linked to the area of the country in which she lived. By evoking imagery of the Black Death in her explanation of the Passion and the existence of suffering, Julian of Norwich sought to restore unity to medieval English society through a re-envisioning of the Holy Trinity as Earthly authority figures: family/household, Holy Mother Church, and feudal lord. A holistic view of her book of “Showings” reveals that the plague and its aftermath are actually central to her theosophical project. While this is certainly true, this is also perhaps a bit myopic. The divine mother figure was now not only a creator but a source of protection and comfort. Despite this formative experience, scholarly treatments of the plague’s impact on Julian’s writing focus primarily on her use of maternal imagery as a pre-existing general trend in mystic texts which developed a new significance in post-plague religious writing. The first outbreak of the bubonic plague in Norwich was in 1349 when Julian was only six years old and continued for another twenty-one years of sporadic outbreaks in East Anglia. The woman known as Julian of Norwich, the first female author in the English language, survived a pandemic which tore English society apart.

Showings julian of norwich pdf